


The Courage of Stars

by epsiloneridani, phantom_of_the_keurig



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, M/M, Purge Trooper CC-2224 | Cody, no accelerated aging
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 06:15:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29853810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epsiloneridani/pseuds/epsiloneridani, https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantom_of_the_keurig/pseuds/phantom_of_the_keurig
Summary: Cody wasn’t dead.It pulsed in Rex’s chest, the heartbeat of an undeniable truth. The Order had gone out and the galaxy had burned, but Cody hadn’t burned with it. Wherever he was now, whoever he had been made to become: he could come back.They could bring him home.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody & CC-3636 | Wolffe, CC-2224 | Cody & CC-5576-39 | Gregor, CC-2224 | Cody & CT-7567 | Rex, CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi
Comments: 49
Kudos: 243





	The Courage of Stars

“That better not be what I think it is.”

Wolffe didn’t shift away from the table. The armory was mostly empty at this hour; all of the other rebels were at their stations, in briefings, or catching a few precious hours of sleep before the next training cycle began. Rex had already completed his reports, tried (and failed) to get Gregor to send his off, and then sought out Wolffe to do the same. There were a lot of logistics that went along with being a commander.

He’d never envied Cody that.

“It’s exactly what you think it is,” Wolffe supplied, and patted the stack of armor he’d piled in front of him.

Rex blew out a slow breath and dragged his hand down his face. Gregor, propped against the doorway beside him, gave him a sly grin. “Quiet,” Rex ordered, before he could say anything. “Wolffe – your reports. Where are they?”

Wolffe snorted, toying with a vambrace to get a good look at the scar driven into its side. He’d taken some shrapnel on their last mission that had peppered into the plastoid and scorched off his markings. Most of the plates were totaled beyond salvage; Wolffe, however, had walked away from the blast with only a few scratches.

“I filed them,” Wolffe supplied. “You can check.”

“They didn’t come across my datapad.”

“Maybe you missed them.”

Gregor chuckled. Rex cast him a withering glare. In typical 212th fashion, he brushed it aside.

“Rex doesn’t miss things,” Gregor said, lips twitching into a smirk. He dragged a hand absently through his dark curls. His hair was longer than standard regulation by a long shot; he pulled it back in a loose, low bun when he was fully kitted up in armor, but Rex still wondered how he stood the suffocating heat – or how, if the bun came apart, he managed to see anything.

Wolffe hummed thoughtfully. “That’s not how I remember Kamino.”

“The reports,” Rex reminded, through grit teeth. “Where are they?”

“I uploaded them to the main computer.”

“That’s not the protocol I set up, Wolffe.”

Wolffe lifted one shoulder in a shrug. Rex leveled a scowl at him. Wolffe knew the protocols he’d established inside and out, and must have just decided that a direct upload would be beneficial in two ways: it allowed him to submit the file to the system immediately, without waiting for Rex to receive it, and it ensured that his report would be marked as complete without Rex ever having read and approved a word of it.

Which meant it must read like an incomprehensible shitshow.

“Going through what’s left of your armor is not more important than keeping proper records,” Rex said, measured.

Wolffe spared him a glance over his shoulder. “Relax, Rex. My work is accurate.”

“But is it eloquent?” Gregor arched an eyebrow elegantly.

“I didn’t say it wasn’t accurate,” Rex returned. “I just said you didn’t submit it according to protocol.”

Wolffe flapped a hand at him. His eyes were on his armor again. “Then go pull up the file on the main computer in the command center and check.”

“In the future—”

“Yeah, I’ll send you the damned reports first.”

Gregor’s eyes gleamed with mirth. Rex turned to leave, knocking their shoulders together and leaning in a fraction to linger. “Get your reports to me by the end of the day,” Rex said. “Got it?”

Gregor carefully blanked his face. “Of course, Commander,” he agreed, all stoic professionalism. If his eyes weren’t sparkling, Rex might have bought it.

“Don’t know how in the hell Cody put up with you,” Rex muttered, and brushed by him and into the hall.

The corridors were as deserted as the armory. Rex keyed up the holocomputer embedded in his vambrace as he made his way toward the commander center. The time block on the schedule was empty. Made sense. The  _ Ghost _ crew had just departed on a major operation. Rex had spent most of his time the last few weeks helping them plan it, which meant Gregor and Wolffe, when they weren’t conducting training for the rebels, or running maintenance on their weapons, had taken the opportunity to ignore their reports.  _ What the hell do those even accomplish anway? _ Wolffe had asked.  _ I filed thousands during the war and all they ever do is clog up the system and collect dust. No one actually reads them _ .

Rex hadn’t had an answer then, and he didn’t now. Maybe it was an instinct left over from an earlier age. Maybe it was the diligence he’d drilled to maintain. Maybe reports were a goddamn waste of everyone’s time, and he was clinging to some small semblance of structure to keep him sane in a world where he never knew which way he could turn to find someone solid to hold onto.

“Or maybe,” Rex muttered, and scanned his ID chip to gain access to the command center, “Wolffe’s just a  _ di’kut _ .”

The door hissed aside.

As soon as Rex set foot in the room, the air went deathly still.

The space was not empty. Not even close. Two squads of rebels were fanned out at the rear. Rex counted at least three individuals he’d seen on heavy ordinance assignment before – the ones that handled rockets launchers and artillery. At least six of the others were snipers Gregor himself had trained, and the rest were what remained of the most elite rebels the  _ Ghost _ crew had left behind. Rex had wondered at their absence when he read the roster, then brushed it aside as foresight. If the mission went to hell and took them with it, Hera wanted some seniority to remain in their stead. It was purely tactical.

Rex surveyed the room and realized, with a sinking feeling, that he’d almost been right. It was tactical – just not in the way he’d first thought.

General Davits Draven stood at the head of the briefing table. His fingers drove into its edge, hard enough to bend the plastoid a degree. In the static silence, the tiny creak felt like a thundercrack.

For a terrible, breathless moment, no one moved.

Rex lifted his gaze to the holo they’d been studying before he walked in. There were plans to an Imperial base, situated deep in the Empire’s territory. Schematics for a variant of stormtrooper armor that vaguely reminded him of the old paratrooper armor some of his brothers used to wear; a readout at its side noted the armor was outfitted with a cortosis weave to make it resistant to lightsaber strikes. Electrostaff statistics. Scrolling records that went back to the beginning of the Clone Wars. An Imperial-issued portrait, marked below with a series of letters and numbers that labeled its access-requirement: top-secret.

Rex’s next inhale caught in his throat.

“Cody,” he croaked.

He hadn’t seen him, after the order went down. Rex had thought about contacting him so many times, and with each unsteady iteration his resolve had weakened. When he and Ahsoka had parted ways, when he’d been alone – it had collapsed entirely.

By then it had been too late.

A soft scuffle shook him out of it. One of the rebels had shifted his foot, just a bit. Rex turned his attention to Davits.

His face was placid, though Rex could still see the edge of nerves in his hard-set scowl. “Everyone,” Davits said, lifting his voice to be heard even though the room was, largely, as silent as a tomb. “This briefing will be concluded at a later time. I want all of you to monitor your communications for further—”

“Like hell,” Rex said, voice cracking and barely a whisper, and still enough to stop Davits cold. “Like hell it will be. What is this?”

“That’s not a demand you have the authorization to make, Commander.”

Rex raised one finger in trembling accusation. Cody hovered above him. His hair was shaved close to his skull, the way he hated it. Rex could just barely make out thin streaks of silver patterned against his skull.

The scars, however, stood out more prominently. The jagged line still cut down his left temple and over his left brow, accentuated now by a few thinner marks at his hairline, and a deep, long-healed wound that began just below his right ear, ran along his jaw, and stuttered to a stop on his neck: just before the blade that made it would have struck an artery, and sent him to his grave. Rex ached to reach out for him. Ached to hold the holo in his hand and memorize his brother’s face again. There was no light in Cody’s eyes.

He read like glass.

Rex crossed the space to the console in two strides and stopped a mere inch from Davits’ personal space. The general had almost half a foot on him, and had spent his years with the Rebellion conducting cutthroat intelligence operations and directing shadow games and spies. He was well-versed in intimidation. Proximity wasn’t enough to make him flinch; he only squared his shoulders and set his jaw. His build, combined with that record, would have been enough to make most beings back down, and he knew it.

But Rex was not most beings.

“That,” Rex grit out, and jabbed a finger into Davits’s chest, “is my brother. Now I’m only going to ask this once: what in the  _ hell _ is going on?”

Davits glowered down at him. “As I said, Commander,” he bit out, voice tight, “you are not authorized to receive that intelligence.”

“You found Cody.” The words left him in a disbelieving rush. For years, he and Wolffe and Gregor had scoured the known universe, blowing up weapons depots and raiding data centers and extracting as many control chips as they could along the way, and they’d only ever managed to gather whispers and ghosts. Some of their rescued brothers from the 212th had claimed to have seen Cody lying dead on Utapau, cut down by Kenobi. Others told them that Cody was living as a shell of his former self: that they’d seen him, and the chip’s protocols had buried themselves so deeply in his psyche he’d lost all sense of his former self. That he had sworn allegiance to and served the Empire with whatever life he had left in his soul, and would until the day he took his last breath.

Rex had brushed off the rumors as the confused ramblings of very traumatized men. The chip changed your perception at the root: it made you see enemies where none existed and fabricated just enough rationale that, in the moment, your orders made enough sense for you to pull the trigger. Rex mostly just tried his best not to think about it; it brought back too much.

Davits didn’t have that problem. He must have taken the rumors and meticulously extracted the common pieces of truth, over and over again until it gave him a place to start. Rex wondered, from the way his eyes flashed, how many beings had died to bring him it.

“This mission is classified above your clearance level,” Davits ground out. “Its disclosure is need-to-know.”

“I don’t give a damn about my clearance level,” Rex hissed, low enough that only Davits could hear him. Cody’s portrait hovered above them like a ghost. He was out there somewhere. He was alive, and they knew where to find him. “That’s my brother. The existing protocols dictate that I be informed. Ahsoka established—”

“Ahsoka Tano has no authority over my operations,” Davits interrupted. “She may have her own intelligence network, but she has no say in how I run mine.”

“You can’t just execute him,” Rex hissed, before he could stop himself. “Whatever he’s done – it’s not his fault. It’s not him.”

“Do you have any idea how many deaths he’s responsible for?” Davits’s scowl deepened. “Not just rebels. Civilians.”

“It’s not him.”

“Jedi padawans.”

The words hit him so hard they knocked the breath from his lungs. Searching for Cody, spending hours hunched over a ’pad planning an op, Rex had forced himself to focus on the mission, and not on what the Empire was forcing Cody to do in their service.

Davits seemed to take his silence as a victory. “We have located Imperial Purge Trooper Commander CC-2224, previously identified as Marshal Commander Cody of the 7th Sky Corps and its subdivision, the 212th Attack Battalion, now identified only as IT-2224,” he stated, raising his voice to be heard by the room. “He’s been active in various sectors, sabotaging Rebel operations. He’s wiped out more of our squads than I can actively recall. We will do what needs to be done to stop him.”

A murmur of agreement ran through the crowd. Rex’s heart turned sharply in his chest. He remembered fear, and pain, and leveling his weapons at the kid he’d called  _ little sister _ for the better part of a war. She’d saved his life more times than he could count, and he hers, and he’d still raised his arms against her as surely as all the rest.

It had never been a choice. For any of them.

“Do you have any idea how the chips work?” Rex demanded, projecting his voice too. He tapped a finger to his temple, over the ridged scar running just below his hairline. “There is an organic piece of programming implanted in his brain. He doesn’t have a choice.”

“Neither do we.”

Fury curled in Rex’s chest like a flame. “He doesn’t deserve to die for what the Empire made him do.”

“What’s the alternative?” Davits demanded. “He’s been in Imperial service for over a decade. If there was anything of him left in there, it’s gone now. Face the obvious facts, Commander: your brother is dead. The man in that holo is an Imperial Purge trooper, and a threat to this rebellion.”

Rex curled a hand into a fist at his side. “I don’t believe that.”

“Then don’t believe it. My orders stand. We will carry out this operation, regardless of your feelings on the matter.”

The go-ahead must have come from someone further up the chain of command. Briefly, Rex considered Bail Organa, and decided he didn’t want to know if one of Kenobi’s oldest friends had ordered Cody’s execution. It stopped his breath in a way he couldn’t afford.

If those rebels set foot outside this room, Cody might be as good as dead.

“I might not have the authority to stop this,” Rex said, lifting his gaze and meeting Davits’s scowl head-on. “But I would suggest you make a better tactical reading before carrying this operation out.”

Davits’s eyebrows shot up. “Enlighten me,” he said, when he’d recovered his voice. “What’s the flaw in my analysis?”

Rex squared his shoulders. “Regardless of who Cody may be now, he’s still one of the Empire’s most elite soldiers. He’ll have knowledge of facilities the Imperials would never put in a central database – weapons, tactics, strategies. You said it yourself: he’s been in their system for over a decade. He’ll know it like the back of his hand.”

Davits scrutinized him. Rex took a slow step back, out of his personal space. “The chip might have changed him,” Rex said, a voice for the fear curling around his ribs; he’d never admitted it out loud before. “But your operatives gave their lives to bring you his location. If you assassinate him, everything he knows dies with him.”

Davits stood silent for a moment, considering. His brows furrowed. “He’ll never disclose any of that information of his own volition.”

“Once we take the chip out, he will,” Rex shot back, and told himself it wasn’t a lie. They’d taken out hundreds of his brothers’ chips. Sometimes, they woke completely lucid; sometimes – there were complications. Sometimes. “He’ll tell us. We just have to get him back here alive.”

“A Purge trooper isn’t just going to come willingly.”

“I’ve known him my entire life,” Rex said firmly. “I can help you bring him in.”

Davits scrutinized him. For a moment, Rex was sure he’d failed; Davits’s posture radiated refusal. Tension was strung through every line of his stance.

Rex stopped breathing.

At last, Davits blew out a resigned sigh. “I am willing to shift the mission’s operational parameters,” he said, voice tight. “But he will be brought in as an enemy combatant for medical evaluation and treatment. Once he’s recovered, he will undergo an extensive debriefing. I expect no interference from you, Commander.”

Debriefing was a kind way of describing an interrogation. But it was better than being dead. He’d have Cody here with him. He could help him.

Rex nodded shortly. “I understand.”

Davits’s jaw twitched. He didn’t speak; he only stepped to the side and made a space at the briefing table. Rex moved in to fill it. The hologram shimmered and shifted; dimly, Rex was aware that Davits was relaying the updated mission parameters to the gathered squads, and on some level, he was absorbing it and storing the information away for later reference. He’d developed the habit on Kamino, and it had served him well ever since.

It also left him too much space to think.

Training had drilled into him one core concept: that his continued survival was contingent upon his utility. If he stopped being useful, then he stopped being worth the resources it took to keep him alive. It had taken him years to unlearn the lie he’d always feared to be truth; helping the survivors he’d saved come to terms with their new life had forced him to confront his own demons – convinced him to believe the words he’d repeated over and over until they were burned into his brothers’ memories:  _ You’re more than a soldier. You always have been _ .

There was a cruel irony, then, that to save Cody he had to say the opposite. It made his gut churn uncomfortably even now, as Davits droned on about Imperial intel and potential secrets. He hadn’t agreed to change the mission out of compassion, as Ahsoka would have, or in sympathy, as Soto might have. He hadn’t agreed because Cody was Rex’s brother. He’d agreed because Rex had made a valid tactical point: Cody was, himself or not, too much of an asset to just execute.

And that was the only reason to spare his life.

The room emptied in a wave as soon as the briefing ended. Rex lingered. Cody’s portrait was still humming in the center of the space. Those empty eyes stared out at him.

“Hang on, Cody,” Rex whispered. “I’m coming to get you. We’re gonna bring you home.”


End file.
